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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.

A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:

But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

Edit: typo

I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.

I ended up going into technology, because it was the only sufficiently merit-based thing I could find in which I could sort of force open the door. Even there, I think I got a senior role just in time, as I hear the entry level is very very bad these days. I've had conversations with my wife about what we might advise our future children to do with their lives, and I've mentally prepared to tell them that certain dreams are just impossible, and some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them. Maybe it's been a good thing, in that I was forced to keep some things I love as just a hobby, and so I never got burnt out on them by trying to make them a career.

I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.

Yeah I had a similar path, wanted to go for a history PhD but all my professors told me it was hopeless as a white man. I also went into a tech startup, and we crushed it, then I got fired two weeks before my equity would've vested despite far surpassing all the goals in my initial contract.

I try to keep the light in my heart alive, stay focused on Christ, etc, but damn I am fucking angry. I have to say. I wish there was a more constructive movement to end this shit, very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.

very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.

There needs to be more vitriol. You can't just ask nicely not to be ethnically cleansed. The people you are up against have recently and openly learned they can just murder you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.

Vitriol is a start to what you need to do.

The guy who killed Charlie Kirk is suffering the consequences. He will likely be executed. What more do you want? Random innocent people to be punished as vengeance? People getting shot by random crazies is a fact of life in a free society, and the only person responsible is the killer.

Yes, the left traded a pawn for a knight or a bishop. Maybe even a queen. They don't seem too upset about that trade, and in the meantime they are winning elections, and their base is crying out for more political murders.

"Oh" you might say "But after Charlie Kirk was killed, thousands of chapters of Turning Point USA were founded!"

First, we'll see how that pans out, and second, the left decided they can murder those too.

Meanwhile almost every single popular conservative is afraid to appear in public because the left will murder them. The right has almost zero ground game because the left will murder them if they do.

It's a winning strategy, and I think we need more of it. Making journalist, judges, legislators and administrators fear for their life in public is a proven strategy.

Can we please wait until there's at least a suspect in custody before using the Brown shooting to support your narrative?

Yes but this sort of hate-fueled rhetoric is just inaccurate which turns a ton of people off. Democrats lawmakers/elites are not openly murdering conservatives, poorly adjusted criminals and depressed schizos are. I understand that there's a strong argument to be made that the Democratic governance LEADS to these murders, but you have to actually make that argument!!

When you say things like

they can just murder you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.

This loses you the moral high ground, and the fight when it comes to normies. You're being taken in by your rage and making strategic mistakes. It's not just that it's factually wrong it's that it's a losing strategy.

Yes but this sort of hate-fueled rhetoric is just inaccurate which turns a ton of people off.

Democrats have been almost pure delusional hate-fueled rhetoric for most of my adult life, intensifying into cancerous ferocity over the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have turned anyone off on general principles.

This loses you the moral high ground, and the fight when it comes to normies.

No, it seems like that's just media dominance and message control. If you refuse to ever tolerate or acknowledge validity of criticism of your own extremists, you apparently can just brazen out the moral high ground.

The rhetoric of pro-Israel politicians is a great example of this point. Randy Fine can talk about how beautiful it is to see dead babies and call for the extermination of Palestinian children all he wants and the DNC aren't even willing to mildly chastise him, let alone pass a condemnation of him like they did for Nick Fuentes.

Look up Jay Jones again.

You are point of fact wrong on every point.

Let me put that another way. Ten years ago everyone knew white males were being discriminated against. Say it then and people like you would accuse me of "giving into hate and losing the normies". Now that it's fait accompli, all the institutions have been lost, white family formation is in the toilet, and our country is lost, people are coming out of the woodwork admitting "Yeah, we did that shit". Articles like the above are allowed to be published. But it's too late, there is no reversing it.

And I'm sure in 10 years time, there will be another slate of late admissions "Yeah, we did permit the ethnic cleansing of white people. Oh well!". And when the actions required to make the survivors whole are proposed, people like you will once again wring their hands going "Woah, woah, that's too scary, you'll lose the normies!"

The normies need to be radicalized. And attempts must be made 24/7 to see that they are brought on board with saving themselves. If you are afraid of losing them, you are failing in your moral duty to save them.

Just a reminder that whites have the stablest TFR in the US, it's actually slightly ahead of the black TFR, that US immigration is more white than black, and that whites of any age are the most likely to be married. Your blackpill on white people is not true, although white demographic decline is still likely.

You're not wrong, but what use is it to have a bunch of radicalized red tribers if there is no plan for them to fight back? As far as I can tell, the "The Republican Party is Doomed" article still holds true today. Without control of any important institutions, there's not a lot you can do.

"The Republican Party is Doomed" is still written by a man that conflates certification with education with job security with meaningful skills, and who today has yet to confront or recognize a very simple flaw downstream of what that means:

There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.

The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.

That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.

More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.

I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.

More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.

Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care. There's a functional moral and legal principle, here.

But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen. There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.

And then there's an actual horror stories.

Remember Malheur? Two years ago, if it happened again, common knowledge had already become that people committing actual terrorist arson against federal police didn't get a 'mandatory' terrorism enhancement. Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support, and until and unless they literally shot -- not shot at -- federal officers, they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.

But don't worry, without a college diploma, Red Tribers won't drop rocks. That's a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem. Electricians, machinists, plumbers, gun nuts, maintenance employees, firefights, construction workers, no possible relevant domain expertise. or at least none I'm willing to discuss publicly

Remember when FEMA decided that they weren't going to provide support to houses with Trump political signs? Ah, without the proper cred-en-tialis there's no way some Red Triber would end up walking door to door or considering neighborhoods dangerous based on matters tangentially related to politics. They'll just be a ton of people doing work requiring hands-on expertise, to serve people they hate and know hate them, with ready and long awareness of normal and subtle failure modes. No way they might be in evacuated neighborhoods before most residents return, with easy arguments to defend any place they could be at all.

Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with? Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?

These don't require a plan. Many of them don't even require explicit coordination beyond listening to the news, sometimes even only listening to news reporters biased against them. They're not even indicia I think are particularly likely -- since I don't want this to happen, I'm not going to meme my way into disaster.

But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.

Then consider how much post-Civil Rights Act civility may have depended on how difficult it was to ensure an attack would hit the 'guilty' and not hit the 'innocent' -- as the charcoal briquettes rant highlighted, the Oklahoma City Bomber very specifically choose to burn children to death among others -- and what signal hearing "Kirk deserved it" jokes and 'jokes' from their neighbors have sent.

I would like it to not be this way. I don't see many people actually arguing it isn't. Only that it shouldn't be.

You're not wrong, but what use is it to have a bunch of radicalized red tribers if there is no plan for them to fight back?

There was no plan, and Charlie Kirk is still dead, the power he wielded in life shattered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the four winds.

You can make a pretty big impact without a "plan".